Time and Time Again
A Conversation with RTC Artistic Director
& Lonesome Traveler Creator
James O'Neil
This week’s world premiere of RTC’s Lonesome Traveler was literally years–if not decades–in the making, in the mind and imagination of RTC Artistic Director James O’Neil. The busy writer/director recently sat down with us to discuss the show’s evolution, the nature of collaboration and more…
RTC: You spent all these years writing it, and now you’ve pushed the sled right up to the precipice, and its taking off.
JO: If you’ve been a director long enough, you know the beginning of rehearsals is darn near the end of the whole thing. The cast doesn’t know that – their experience is just beginning–but literally you’re thinking “Okay, the show closes in five weeks, that’s not very far away.”
But over all the time it took to develop this show, you’ve gone through so much stuff, a lot of people don’t realize. In some ways it’s easier if you’re doing tried and true pieces, like Streetcar right? It’s been thoroughly and famously interpreted; you can default to the way it’s worked before – but even at that, so many little decisions get made that are irrevocable by the time the cast shows up… things like where the entrances and exits are, it’s done, you’re not going to change them once the set is being built.
Certainly for a piece like this, it’s brand new, and it feels like “we better get this as right as we can get it”–but what is that? With an older piece, you know it will work a certain way – with this we still have to make all the same decisions, but we’re figuring out what it’s going to be for the very first time. So when you talk about the sled coming up to the precipice, that’s exactly how I feel!
So you draw on whatever experience you have, and make your choices based on best guesses, and you have to make decisions as the clock is ticking. So in a real way we ARE at that precipice.
RTC: Great works of art are often shaped by the circumstances in which those decisions had to be made – so if resources are scarce, for example, there is inspiration that derives from it.
JO: Yes, that’s true. For example, we take what we learned from the audition process, and it gave us a better idea to know how to divide the material between the people we cast. Then again, it might change…
RTC: It WILL Change!
JO: It will change, yes. We’ll say “I thought that would work, but yes, it’s better this way.
RTC: That is so exciting – you’ve taken this writer’s journey all these years asLonesome Traveler came to life, and now you set that hat aside for the more collaborative hat as more people come into the creative circle – now (musical director) Dan Wheetman’s voice is added to the mix, then the cast comes on...
JO: The collaborative hat, yes. And I have to collaborate with myself, as well - I have to argue with myself, as I find that some ideas I imagined, when brought to the physical space, might not work. So you just let it go, or add something else. I don’t think the writer is gone; he’s gotta stay around, but I think at that point the writing comes from the point of view of the director. It’s the first time I’ve tried to do both, so we’ll see how it goes. As a writer being influenced by my experience as a director, I’ll be surprised if I run into a lot of problems, but we’ll see as we put this thing on its feet.
RTC: You must know this material better – at this point – than anything you’ve ever directed.
JO: Oh certainly. No question about it. I do a lot of research when I direct a show, but the experience of actually doing the writing, it changes everything. That experience has informed it. So you’re right – sometimes I meet with people who have a lot to offer the show, by virtue of their own experience, and I’ll hear what they have to say, and sometimes it’s a great idea, but frequently I’ll hear what they have to say and think “um, no, you don’t get what I’m trying to do here.” Having written the piece, I end up knowing more about it than most, because I’ve done the research. That said, many times in collaboration truly great ideas come to the table. If you’re open to making the work the best it can be, then the best idea in the room wins.
RTC: You’re getting a sense of the show, and making decisions about how it’s going to play, but the power of music is so intangible–when the music fills up the theatre…
JO: It takes over. And I think you have to respect that. Many people wanted a lot more scene work in this show, they wanted it to feel more like a play, and I said “You know what, no.” I always conceived the second act as the concert–he (the title character - the “Lonesome Traveler”) is already there. We already know enough about him, it’s not about his story per seat that point; his story began, it’s continuing, and we don’t need to hear it at that point as a play.
RTC: Everything he has to say at that point is sung.
JO: Exactly. We need the premise, and a few narrative references along the way, and let it go.
RTC: And isn’t that what were they doing with roots music from the very beginning? They were telling their story.
JO: The story is told in the songs, the story is told in the history of when the songs were done, and why they were done, and that takes care of it. If you didn’t get it before, you’re not going to get it now because I bang you over the head with some thesis.
This piece was never easy to get just by reading it–song lyrics just lay there on the page; they don’t read like poetry, they were never meant to be divorced from melody. But like you said, when the music fills up the theatre–
RTC: Then watch it take off. Again, it highlights the difference in the hats you’re wearing – as a writer, it’s very clear to you what you’re doing, even if a lot of people don’t get it on the page. Now, as a director, this collaborative experience begins, and you’re not having to explain lyrics on a page–the song DOES play, and people get it immediately.
JO: And then the collaboration does inform it, yes. For example (set designer) Tom Giamario kept coming back to this idea of timelessness, which he realized was wrong, that it wasn’t timeLESS, it was timeFULL, meaning all time, all at once. And time was such a tricky part of writing this piece, (we go back and forth in time) and we realized that it wasn’t a problem if we didn’t interpret it so strictly.
RTC: What time is it? It’s now, it’s then, it’s always.
JO: Yes. So in our collaboration, Tom is describing my own ideas back to me, interpreting what I’d told him – and in that filter they are refined; so in a sense he’s getting ideas from me that I didn’t even realize I’d had, and I from him.
The last thing I wanted this to look like was a documentary, with this rigid historical accuracy – this is not meant to be PBS. We’re playing fast and loose with the time frame, and that speaks to the theme that we’re all dependent as people and artists on the people who came before us – as we go forward we change it, morph it, do what we do, in art and all life, and then sometimes we go backwards. Sometimes fashion returns to the twenties, right? We go backwards and forwards in influence and time, all the time. I like the idea that we think of this less as history than simply as influence. So we make jokes about time, we’re joking about Enron, but we’re in 1960, that kind of thing, and we wink at it.
RTC: So the audience gets to be in on the joke.
JO: The audience is neck deep in it, the whole time – that’s the gift the music brings to it. And everybody sings along. Pete Seeger spoke to that idea; he said, (reading)
“Participation, that’s what’s going to save the human race.
Once upon a time wasn’t singing a part of everyday life, as much as talking, physical exercise and religion? Our distant ancestors, wherever they were in this world, sang while pounding grain, paddling canoes or walking long journeys.
Can we begin to make our lives once more all of a piece? Finding the right songs and singing them over and over is a way to start. And when one person taps out a beat while another leads into the melody; or when three people discover a harmony they never knew existed, or a crowd joins in on a chorus as though to raise the ceiling a few feet higher, then they also know there is hope for the world.”
RTC: There’s Lonesome Traveler, in a nutshell, yes?
JO: That’s it, yes.
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